The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventor, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A high density blade server system typically includes a plurality of server modules (hereinafter also referred to as server blades). By arranging the plurality of server blades in a multi-server cabinet, the high density blade server system achieves significant cost and space savings over a plurality of conventional stand-alone servers. These savings result directly from the sharing of common resources, e.g., common power supplies, common cooling systems, enclosures, etc., and the reduction of space required by this type of multi-server system, while providing a significant increase in available computing power. A blade server system usually includes one or more switches configured to route data packets in the blade server system.
A modern centralized data processing center generally has several (e.g., numbering even in the hundreds) such blade server systems. Power consumption per unit of computing power decreases with a blade server system compared to, for example, a system that comprises a plurality of conventional stand alone servers. However, the larger number of server blades within a blade server system, and the large number of such blade server systems in a data processing center results in significant power consumption. Thus, a marketability of a blade server system is at least in part tied to a power usage by the blade server system.